With Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, GLM, and the other auditing compliance programs getting so much attention, all aspects of the network environment are under a microscope. For any operating system environment this includes the auditing of the user accounts and their related properties. Considering that many attacks are accessed through a user account that has one or more incorrect and insecure settings, it makes sense to focus on user account properties during the audit. Within a Windows Active Directory environment there are the standard user properties that must be audited, plus a few that may not fall into too many other network environments. This article will discuss the key user account properties that need to be audited, as well as the tools that can help complete the task.

By Derek Melber at WindowSecurity.com

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